This is (not) St. Pauli
Hamburg’s St. Pauli district, with its famous “sündige Meile” (sinful mile), immediately triggers as many associations as it does camera releases. The somewhat stuffy blissful shivers in the face of obscenity and the fascination of going completely haywire each and every weekend – this side of St. Pauli has so often been captured by cameras or mailed out on innumerable postcards.
With his sharply focused view and an approach oriented on the New Objectivity movement, Daniel Barthmann drafts a different image of St. Pauli: that of a densely populated, heterogeneous city district, displaying intense social and economical polarities, in constant genesis and disintegration. His searching motion takes the form of an indifferent, non-directional walk. The pictures collected underway focus precisely on places and situations, where the urban planer would rather unwillingly look the other way and the clubbers would unknowingly walk past.
In the piles of bulky trash found in a rear courtyard, amateurishly nailed-together board architecture and facades undistortedly revealing the process of construction and decay, Daniel Barthmann discovers the inner perspective of a neighbourhood which has always defiantly and for the most part successfully escaped the grasp of rational planning. Provisional architecture serving some sort of functional objective, vain attempts to provide withering walls with notions of hope and future by applying a coat of paint, jauntily chaotic mishaps in colour and shape and haphazardly created spatial situations (as an antithesis to structured urban planning) are the benchmarks of this multi-faceted everyday environment interspersing the entire neighbourhood of St. Pauli as well as its amusement quarters on the Reeperbahn.
Starting from these emissions emerging from the uncoordinated coexistence of individual alterations of predefined surroundings, Daniel Barthmann assembles elaborately constructed tableaus, depicting the complexity of an urban space left untouched by the simplifying influence of urban planning. In the visual composition of the pictures, this space is understood as an aesthetical phenomenon. The setting as photographical vanishing point extends the haphazardness of these micro architectures into a symbolic stability. A stability which is bound to dissolve as soon as one attempts to actually visit the photographed places only to find that the motives captured in the pictures no longer exist.
Martin Kohler